Pelvic health is an increasingly important health issue, e.g., based on an aging population. Treatment of pelvic conditions, such as urinary continence is an area of much investigation. Such conditions are desired to be treated with therapeutic agents as opposed to invasive surgical procedures, when possible, in order to avoid risks of surgical procedures, such as infection, and recovery period and pain for the patient. Therapeutic agents should be delivered with minimized discomfort and procedure time, and with the best degree of accuracy of delivery location and delivery volume as possible. As such, there exists continuing need to provide improved treatment methods and devices for delivering therapeutic fluids to the pelvic region of a patient.
One type of disease of the pelvic tissue is bladder cancer, which is the second most common urological malignancy. Most bladder tumors are not invasive into the bladder muscle layer (also known as superficial tumors). Non-invasive bladder cancer is commonly treated using surgical transurethral resection of the bladder tumor to take out the lesion. Recurrence of non-invasive bladder cancer is about 50% and depends on certain prognostic factors such as tumor grade, tumor stage, and in situ carcinoma. Intravesical chemotherapy following surgical resection of the bladder tumor is often carrier out to delay or prevent recurrence or progression to muscle-invasive bladder cancer. Despite surgical resection and intravesical therapy, in a considerable percent of patients superficial lesions will recur, with some recurring lesions progressing to a higher grade or stage that form invasive cancers. Local invasive cancer of the bladder is typically treated by radical cystectomy, but this can result in the loss of pelvic floor functions and adversely affect the patient quality of life.
Prostate disease is another pelvic floor disease that poses significant health risks for males. Diseases of the prostate include prostatitis, benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH, also known as benign prostatic hypertrophy), prostatic intraepithelial neoplasia (PIN), and prostatic carcinoma.